How well do influential/highly acclaimed games from yesteryear hold up? Are they as good as before or horribly dated and not quite the transcendent experience that old gamers claim. If these are the questions your asking this is the blog for you.

The game: Half Life's importance in shaping the way First Person shooters where developed is greater than any shooter that could follow. Prior to valves debut FPS's where not very different from doom and other id titles where subsequent FPS's from other companies where often called “Doom clones” by many gamers. Half Life changed all that with it's heavily structured level design that put PC gamers of 1998 on the roller coaster of their life. In recent years half-life's influence can be seen just about everywhere as linear FPS's dominate the gaming market, each one with an increasingly user friendly interface and level design (often accompanied by a man shouting where you go next). But how well does the game that popularized these design concepts hold up? especially after played the games successors (Half life 2 and it's “episodes”).

A little personal history with the series: When I first purchased the orange box 4 years ago I remember being very excited to play this Half-Life 2 that everyone was raving about. After both Bioshock and Portal I was excited for another excellent game that would grab nay assault me with it's brilliance within it's opening minutes. To my surprise Half-life 2's opening was rather slow and somewhat confusing with it's cryptic dialogue. Other games threw you into the action from the start yet Half-Life 2 sort of eases into the action building an environment and showing players a creepy alien occupied world. Needless to say my initial reaction was lukewarm at best 10 out of 10? for this boring game? I could be getting some rad power ups in the Metriod Prime games meanwhile this long boat section is irritating beyond reason. Eventually I warmed up on the game, I enjoyed the striking yet efficient art design that conveys a distinct world that's not in-your-face and the unusual storytelling that's big on action and limited on long gobs of expository dialogue. By Nova Prospect my lukewarm feeling had been long forgotten as I led an army of insects against combine soldiers. However even after playing through the episodes I still felt like a piece of the picture was missing, I wondered why a bunch of hapless ninconpoops would lay their down their lives for “the freeman” or why I was hitting vortigons with a crowbar, I could Google this or I could play it and not get the cliff notes version.

"your waitng for a train..."

The experience: Like it's successors Half-Life begins not with a loud attention grabbing spectacle but rather eases you in with a slow train ride through an underground facility where the uneasy sense of things going wrong are abound. Of course within minutes a large dimensional hole sends the rest of the place into chaos yet before that a sense of place is established along with anything else you needed to know about Black Mesa. Of course Half-Life's plot by itself isn't the most original creation on paper, pitched as a horror game early in development Half-Life is living proof that storytelling technique is as important and possibly more important than what the story is. The game is light on dialogue there is maybe a hundred or less lines uttered in the game that tells most of it's narrative through scripted actions that show a lot and tell rather little. Another key element is its sound design, with limited resources sound designer and composer Kelly Bailey creates an iconic and unnerving sound to black mesa, I would go as far as to say that the sounds in Half-life are as instantly recognizable as the sound effects to Star Wars, the music is mostly ambient to carefully maintain the game's atmosphere and blends into the sound effects excellently.

these little buggers will only attack humans, this includes Mr. Freemon

Despite the game's polygonal visuals the mechanics are not terribly different from its successors. You shoot things with a mouse occasionally you need to clear a path and you partake in occasionally irritating but usually painless jumping obstacle courses. On the PC Half-Life is certainly playable but what keeps it interesting from it's modern competition is the elegant level design that never explicitly tells you where to go with flashing arrows or a guy yelling at you, its sort of like a magician convincing you there’s an endless amount of objects in a hat when in reality it's just a carefully rigged illusion. This rigged illusion may be transparent on repeat playthroughs but the game has somehow more moments of genuine excitement than many modern shooters . This quality is seen in the successive entries in the series while. Yet while the game is for the most part an exciting journey it does have a few quirks that remind you that the game was made over 10 years ago.

First thing a gamer raised on modern FPS's will see is far more jumping puzzles and obstacles than other shooters, even more so than it's sequels Half-Life varied the game with occasional platforming along with the action sections. These sections didn't bother me early on yet as the games level design begins to break down in later sections that don't convey where you are very well they become quite irritating. More irritating was the surprising amount of glitches I ran into, you would think that a giant fan that could lift you up it would do so at all times instead of only occasionally working or scientists that your tasked to protect willingly running into sharp objects and bullets wouldn't happen in such a linear game. Nevertheless I managed to pass these troubled sections through the Steam version's cheat console commands (that was exactly what people on the steam forums said, I'm not cheat). However the last section of the game is pretty infamous for it's drop in quality, I'm of course talking about Xen the dimensional alien world that's populated with monsters and floating platforms. The drop in quality wasn't as huge as initially thought though my expectations couldn't have been lower, the entire environment feels less like a living place as seen in black mesa and more like a level from a half-finished quake mod yet the jumping puzzles where not quite the irritating trail and error that I was expecting in fact the mini-boss fight I thought was pretty fun (it was much better than the god awful heat vision turrets from the end of The Cronicles Of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena). However the worst moment is the final boss, a lazy poorly thought out encounter that requires skills not found anywhere else in the game, like shooting glowing crystals and jumping on enemies heads. I failed this encounter a dozen times and after the fourteenth effort I finally called it quits and watched the ending on youtube, it was a reather abysmal final encounter to an otherwise enjoyable game.

I can't pronunce this aliens name I didn't care to try to

Worth playing now?: I would suggest playing Half-life 2 for those not prepared for it's predecessors quirks. But otherwise Half-life is still a highly enjoyable game despite it's faults. Though personally I may not jump to replay it due to it's linear nature, but it's a fun ride that stands out even against it's many modern followers.